Social Media Influencers Promoting “Skinny”

springlering62

sorry to be here with yet another Apple News link, but if you’ve got it, this NY Magazine “The Cut” article is interesting:

https://apple.news/AV0OxwuiIS7OV1SV3zfe5jA

It’s a bit of a deep dive into influencers, particularly this one, who are encouraging eating disorders without actually “encouraging” eating disorders, to skirt the social media platform rules. The author, who had an ED herself as a teen and has been in extended therapy as a result, discusses how easy she found it to fall back into that type of thinking after a short while of subscribing to investigate.

This influencer is making well over $100k a month touting what basically comes across as “eat less, you fat cow”.

I’m so grateful for the posters here on MFP who discourage this, and try to talk to those that teeter in that direction.

AnnPT77

Ghhaa. Ghaack.

The article is paywalled for me, and that's probably a good thing. I don't wanna see it.

There are a bunch of good content creators in existence, but so (too) many of the ultra-hyped, ultra-popular ones are fake-y, shilling for their own products or other companies' products, recommending extreme things that often aren't physically health promoting, and definitely aren't mentally health promoting.

People like that thrive on making others insecure, and setting those others on paths that promise so much, but in reality put them on a punitive merry-go-round of extreme attempts, failures, guilt and self-recrimination, profound insecurity and disempowerment . . . over and over.

Because that's how those scumballs keep making money, either via ad revenue or selling useless stuff: Creating repeat customers for themselves and for the industry.

The more we collectively realize what actually works, have realistic goals, and find out that the process is simpler than advertised (but requires patient persistence) . . . the more we help put those idiots out of business. That would be a Good Thing.